Couple’s counseling is big business in the United States. For right or wrong, psychologists, therapists, and other professional counselors often spend their entire careers helping couples work through their relationship troubles. Sometimes they succeed while other times they fail. More often than not, success or failure depends on how well couples learn the lessons therapy is designed to teach them.
Couples in Westchester County, New York can receive couple’s therapy through Relationships & More. The clinic’s trained therapists work with couples in a variety of ways to help them figure out what is going on between them. They explain that counseling sessions are designed to help couples come to grips with their dysfunction so that they can find ways to overcome it.
Below are three important lessons couple’s therapy tends to offer. Whether or not those lessons are learned is up to the couples themselves. Their responses often determine whether couple’s therapy does them any good.
Lesson #1: Carelessness Kills Passion
Couples in counseling often remark that they have lost that magic. They say that the spark has gone out. What they mean is that they are lacking the passion they once felt in one another’s company. What happened? In all likelihood, they got careless. Therein lies the first lesson: carelessness kills passion.
Being careless in a relationship leads to taking one another for granted. When that happens, couples gradually stop going out of their way to demonstrate love. They stop making the effort to show appreciation. They even put less effort into creating and experiencing intimacy. Over time, such carelessness can cause a relationship to go cold. And when that happens, couples say the spark has gone out.
Lesson #2: Blame Only Obscures the Truth
Though there are exceptions to the rule, couple’s therapy that continues for multiple sessions will eventually reach the point of blame. Couples will begin feeling open enough with their counselors to start blaming one another for their troubles. She blames their marriage troubles on his bad habits; he blames the trouble on her tendency to nag.
In truth, the blame game only obscures the truth of what is really going on. When people blame others for their problems, they are only proving an unwillingness to admit their own. This happens all the time in failed relationships. Rather than owning up to how he has contributed to a failed marriage, the husband lays all the blame on his wife’s feet. She reciprocates when it’s her turn to speak. Neither one of them will face the truth of their own deficiencies.
Lesson #3: There Is No Right One
The third lesson on our list can be the most difficult for some couples to accept. Here it is – there is no ‘right one’. Couples do not end up in a bad marriage because they married the wrong person. Splitting up and going in search for the right one is not a solution. The right one does not exist.
Successful and satisfying relationships don’t happen by chance. They are not a matter of kismet or the alignment of the stars. Successful and satisfying relationships are the result of effort and commitment which, in turn, are results of conscious decisions. The goal is not to find the right one, it is to be the right one.
Couple’s therapy has a lot to offer. When couples approach therapy with an open mind and a willingness to learn, it can go a long way toward helping them restore a broken relationship. But fail to learn the lessons it teaches and couple’s therapy may do little more than reduce their bank balance.